Art dealer Vito Schnabel was arrested at Burning Man 2017 under charges of possessing psylocibin or “magic mushrooms,” a popular psychedelic drug. Schnabel, the owner of a number of galleries in the United States as well as Europe, has pleaded not guilty to the charge, but if he is convicted he could be imprisoned for up to 5 years, according to TMZ (who originally reported the…

Mexico City is reeling following a devastating earthquake on September 19th, and local arts and culture institutions are just beginning to take stock. The earthquake’s epicenter was just 100 miles away from Mexico City, and as of this writing the death toll for the quake is sitting at 200. ArtNews is keeping a watchful eye on Mexican museums, who are continuously updating social…

New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art has acquired an Egyptian sarcophagus dating back to the first century. The coffin was built for the priest Nedjemankh and features intricate detailing in various precious metals, as well as design features intended to help the owner into the afterlife. Prior to the museum’s acquisition, the sarcophagus was owned by an unnamed private collector, who…

The results of Salvador Dali’s posthumous paternity test are in, and it looks like the artist was not the father after all. Forensic scientists in Madrid, Spain, exhumed the body of the artist for testing following a lawsuit by Pilar Abel, a woman who claimed that the famously childless surrealist had in fact had an affair with her mother in the 1950’s. Had the paternity tests come out…

Here’s a profile of artist Trevor Paglin, who has been creating works that explore the idea of surveillance for a number of years. The artist is known for photographing restricted areas and military installations with the help of specialized camera lenses normally used for astrophotography. A survey of Paglin’s work is scheduled to open at the Smithsonian in summer 2018. The article is an…

Here’s a profile of the Japanese museum dedicated to instant ramen noodles. The Momofuku Ando Instant Ramen Museum is named after the inventor of instant noodles, and features exhibitions about everything from the invention process to current packaging designs. Guests can even participate in interactive exhibits - one in which visitors make their own instant noodles from scratch,…

Artist Pope.L is planning an ambitious piece of conceptual art for the Detroit-based gallery, What Pipeline. Pope.L’s project, descriptively titled Flint Water Project, will involve the bottling and sale of 1,200 individual bottles of water from Flint, Michigan, the town which has become infamous for its protracted struggle with area government to restore clean drinking and tap water. In order to…

The winner of this year’s Parkin Drawing Prize is making headlines in part because the work is composed of a carpet, cut into strips and hung in a gallery space. “State Block” by Kirsty Lillico, won the prestigious New Zealand drawing award, which includes a cash prize of $20,000 NZD, beating out over 500 other submitted works, nearly all of which used traditional drawing…

In the quest to find smaller storage spaces for digital media and the like, scientists at Harvard have made a new breakthrough by encoding some of the first known frames of video onto a strand of DNA. Eadweard Myurbridge’s famous Galloping Horse animation, pieced together from photographs taken of a horse running, serves as one of the earliest known examples of stop-motion…

German police brought in four suspects on Wednesday morning in connection with the theft of a giant gold coin in March. The coin, which was the size of a manhole cover and worth the equivalent of $3.9 million USD, was originally produced in Canada, and had been moved to the Bode Museum in Germany, home of one of the world’s largest coin collections. It was not recovered in…

A National Air and Space Museum curator (among others) is expressing skepticism over a photograph that some say shows Amelia Earhart alive after the mysterious disappearance of her plane over a stretch of the equatorial Pacific.. According to a new History Channel special, titled “Amelia Earhart: The Lost Evidence,” a blurry, black and white photograph taken from the U.S.…

1) Works from Cornelius Gurlitt Collection Shown Publicly for the First Time

A new show at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, Germany, marks the first time the public will be able to view works from the notorious art trove of Cornelius Gurlitt. The collection has been kept under wraps for years by German authorities, due to the questionable provenance of the works. Gurlitt’s hoard of artworks included many pieces presumed to have been…

In light of an investigation into allegations of art-related money laundering by a Malaysian fund, actor Leonardo DiCaprio has offered to give the FBI works by Basquiat and Picasso to further the investigation. Malaysian art dealer and financier Jho Low is under investigation for involvement with the scheme, and DiCaprio has been tangentially…